Fifth Annual Conference

Pronunciation in Second
Language Learning and Teaching

Pronunciation
in the Language Teaching Curriculum

September
20-21, 2013

Note: Currently, we are not taking credit card payments because of some
restrictions. We are asking for checks in US dollars. If you do not
have easy access to this form of payment, please register, and then
email us to explain your needs.

Pronunciation,
once a mainstay of language teaching and language teacher education,
has long been ignored or relegated to elective status in the classroom.
Even though research has established that pronunciation plays a central
role in speech intelligibility (e.g., Brodkey, 1972; Fayer &
Krasinski, 1987; Smith & Rafiqzad, 1979), and teachers and
learners believe in its value (MacDonald, 2002), pronunciation is
rarely incorporated into instructional objectives, and when it is
taught is usually done so in an ad hoc fashion. In regard to teacher
education, Murphy (1997) found that TESL teacher preparation programs
that included coursework in phonetics and phonology could greatly
benefit by focusing on applied approaches to phonology, including
practical training in teaching pronunciation. However, pronunciation
teacher education has not changed much since that time, and there is
still a great need for training in the teaching of pronunciation in
language teacher education. Presenters will be invited to
submit their papers for a peer-reviewed, online proceedings of the
conference.

Plenary

Learning how to speak: Pronunciation,
pragmatics and practicalities in
the
classroom and beyond

It
is beyond dispute that learners who
want
to develop good speaking skills in a language also need to develop good
pronunciation, and yet research continues to report that pronunciation
still has
low visibility in the curriculum and is often treated as something of a
poor
relation in the classroom. Many teachers are still wary of
pronunciation as a
specialist area that is somehow separate from the other skills
necessary for
successful communication - an isolationist tendency that can make its
consequent
neglect in the curriculum and in teacher training programs only too
easy.

In
this plenary I go back to basics and
focus on what it is that learners need to do outside the classroom with
the
language they are learning. Drawing on studies that have explored the
lives and
communicative needs of immigrants and international students, I will
illustrate
not only the importance of pronunciation in their lives, but also its
close
interrelationship with other spoken skills. I will then consider the
implications for how we approach the teaching of pronunciation
proactively as
part of developing students’ repertoire of speaking skills in
the classroom and
beyond.

Pre-Conference
Workshop

Models,
metaphors, and the evidence of spontaneous speech: A
new relationship for pronunciation and listening

This
workshop has the goal of improving the teaching of
listening, by identifying and exploiting a new relationship between
pronunciation activities and listening goals. New concepts and
techniques (both
high- and low-tech) will be illustrated. Participants will leave the
workshop
with new ideas to consider, and activities to use immediately in the
class-room. The workshop will begin with thought-provoking theory, and
end with
the ruthlessly practical: but throughout there will be a constant
reference to
the evidence of recordings of spontaneous speech, and continual
opportunities
for suggestions and questions from participants.

Rationale

For
pronunciation and speaking, we encourage clear
intelligible speech. We present learners with a model of speech which
is built
around dictionary pronunciations (citation forms) and rules of
connected
speech. We can think of the citation forms as greenhouse plants. They
are isolated
forms preceded and followed by a pause, with their component parts, the
vowels,
consonants, syllables and stresses, all clearly present. The
rules of
connected speech: linking, elision, sentence stress, etc., can be
thought of as
guidelines for transplanting and arranging greenhouse plants into
orderly
pleasing arrangements in a garden. However, the greenhouse forms and
the
gardening guidelines are not appropriate for teaching listening. This
is
because the speech that learners encounter outside the classroom is
more like
jungle vegetation than garden or greenhouse plants – much
wilder than the forms
they encounter in the classroom. Such speech contains phenomena which
are rarely
seen in textbooks, and words, like
vegetation in the jungle, are blended into their neighbours in ways
which are
not predicted by the rules of connected speech. They are squeezed into
bursts
of the stream of speech, and it becomes difficult to recognise where
one word
begins and another ends, or indeed whether word-endings, syllables, or
whole
words have occurred at all. In class, we need to prepare students for
their
encounters with jungle listening, while continuing to promote
intelligible pronunciation.
This workshop will describe and explore ways of working on these
separate but
related goals.

Timetable

Part 1: Models and
metaphors - The
goals of listening and pronunciation are different. We
need different models of speech for each goal. We have good models in
place for
pronunciation, we have inadequate models for teaching listening. We
need to
distinguish between goals and activities – pronunciation
activities can serve
the goal of listening.

Part 2: Evidence from
spontaneous speech
- Words
have many different soundshapes, of which the citation
form is only one. The soundshapes are formed by interactions between
the
language and speaker factors: gender, accent, choices of
speed, prominence and
clarity.

Part 3: High-tech
solutions: computers, smartphones,
tablets, etc.

- Recent developments in technology enable us to examine what
happens to words in the stream of speech, to compare how words sound
different
as speakers and contexts change. We can manipulate and play with the
sound
substance of speech, in ways which promote faster learning of the
listening
skill.

Part 4: Low-tech
solutions: teachers; and learners' voices
in the classroom -The
teacher's voice, and students' voices can together
be
used in class to create, savour and handle the soundsubstance of the
stream of
speech. We will look at a number of activities that can be used and
adapted to
different teaching contexts.

NOTE:
The pre-conference workshop on Listening and Pronunciation
will be held on Thursday, September 19. It will be available for an
additional fee for all conference participants.